When asked if he understood why members of the media would find the records seizure “troubling,” Holder replied that the leak they are trying to plug was “very, very serious.”

“I’ve been a prosecutor since 1976, and I have to say that this is among, if not the most serious – it’s in the top two or three – most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen,” Holder added. “It put the American people at risk. And that is not hyperbole.”

Fascists always seize on a “crisis” in order to justify the seizure of more power. It is simply what fascists have always done.

According to the Post, the AP had been sitting on a scoop about a failed Al Qaeda plot at the request of CIA officials for five days. The morning they were supposed to release the story, journalists were asked by government officials to wait another day, citing safety concerns.

However, the CIA officials who first cited the security concerns said they no longer had the same worries. Rather, the Obama administration was planning to announce the success of the counterterrorism project the following day, according to The Post report.

But now we have another proof that Eric Holder is a liar without shame, without honor and without integrity. We now know that, rather than unleash this kind of Stalinist surveillance monster for ONE media outlet in ONE circumstance that was “in the top two or three – most serious leaks that I’ve ever seen”, this Stalinism toward the media is an event that has occurred ON MULTIPLE OCCASIONS.

It happened to Fox News, too, involving a different story. Which means so much for the magnitude of the AP leak justifying the Stalinist means.

Fox News reports that three Fox staffers, two reporters and one producer, were targeted by Barack Obama’s Justice Department. Fox doesn’t have all the details yet on reporter William La Jeunesse and producer Mike Levine, but their emails showed up in a IG report regarding Fast and Furious. Either their emails were leaked by the Justice Department officials they were sent to, or the email accounts of both were subpoenaed and invaded by government investigators.

The IG report does say that subpoenas were issued to obtain emails. Whose email was targeted is not yet known.

The third staffer is reporter James Rosen. The Washington Post‘s story behind that is downright chilling. What we have here is a case of the Obama Administration criminalizing reporting.

In June of 2009, James Rosen of Fox News reported that North Korea might respond to an increase in United Nations sanctions with even more nuclear tests. Rosen added that the CIA had learned this information from their sources within North Korea.

According to the Washington Post, upon hearing learning of Rosen’s report, the White House launched what many believe is an unprecedented leak probe that went so far as to criminalize standard news-gathering.

Because the Justice Department believes the source of the leak to Rosen was Jin-Woo Kim, a government adviser, he is facing federal charges that could land him a 10-year prison sentence.

But in their zeal to dig into reporter Rosen’s part in this (and supposedly firm up their case against Kim), the Post reports that FBI agent Regineld Reyes claimed there was “evidence Rosen had broken the law, ‘at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.’”

After building their case against Kim, the Obama administration then went after Rosen, using his badge to trace his whereabouts in the State Department. But they also wanted Rosen’s emails. The Post writes that in order to do this, because of legal protections offered the media, the case had to be made that Rosen was a co-conspirator in a criminal conspiracy to leak national security secrets:

Privacy protections limit searching or seizing a reporter’s work, but not when there is evidence that the journalist broke the law against unauthorized leaks. A federal judge signed off on the search warrant — agreeing that there was probable cause that Rosen was a co-conspirator.

Rosen said the government never contacted him.

The thing you have to keep in mind here is that if Kim and Rosen did what the Obama administration says they did — it is something that happens almost every day between reporters and their sources. It is called everyday journalism; and the Obama administration is attempting to criminalize everyday journalism.

If sources are not leaking information to journalists, what is the alternative? Well, the only alternative is that the media write what the government tells them to write.

ABC Anchor Diane Sawyer sits across from Bill O’Reilly last night and casually says that ABC broke the story about the tapes featuring the sermons of now radioactive and decidedly ex-Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright.

“You’re talking to the network…Obama White House remembers this… that broke the Jeremiah Wright tapes.”

The implication?

ABC News was Johnny-on-the-spot on the story of then-Senator Obama’s now infamous — and ex — pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. In March of 2008.

Remember that date. March — 2008. Here’s the link to the story, filed on March 13 by ABC’s Brian Ross

This remark came about in the course of a conversation with O’Reilly in which Sawyer, discussing the role of ABC News in the last presidential campaign, insisted that her network was not populated by liberals who tilted the news leftward. O’Reilly had cited a study from the Center for Media and Public Affairs on the network news coverage of the Obama-McCain campaign that showed the tilt in favorable coverage for Obama over McCain as follows:

Obama McCain

CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56% 16%
ABC 57% 42%

ABC had fared best of the three broadcast networks, but the point of liberal media bias — the kind of reporting that dates as far back as the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon campaign — stood. So O’Reilly persisted.

And out popped the above statement on Jeremiah Wright.

Let’s be clear here. Sawyer used the word “tapes” — and strictly speaking she is correct.

The problem comes with the context — in which she is clearly trying to imply that ABC was the proverbial dog with a bone in uncovering the relationship of Wright to his famous congregant, and what the implications might be for the country if a man who sat in Wright’s pews for 20 years listening to Wright’s leftist political rants were elected president.

Bluntly put — this is poppycock.

The man — and the network — that did the background research on this was, yes indeed, Sean Hannity and Fox News.

On February 28, 2007 — over a full year before ABC first aired its Wright story — Hannity had located columnist Erik Rush, who had written an article on Senator Obama and his church. He put Rush on the air that night.

The very next night, Hannity had managed to corral Wright himself on his Fox show with liberal Alan Colmes. Here’s the clip.

Out poured the tale of Wright’s devotion to Black Liberation Theology and the radical writings of James Cone and Dwight Hopkins. From this initial work the connections of Wright to Louis Farrakhan and Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi were uncovered and more.

And on it went.

The role of ABC News here?

Zip, nada, zero.

And yet plain as can be, there sits Diane Sawyer, the anchor of ABC News, on the set of Fox’s O’Reilly Factortrying to pretend ABC was a prime mover in Hannity’s story — a Fox story that surely would never have seen the light of day anywhere had it not been for Hannity’s tenacity in digging it out and putting it on TV. And, as regular viewers will recall, being snickered at while doing it — snickering that stopped when Obama finally felt so much pressure on Wright he stopped going to the church and felt the need to publicly rebuke the man he had once said was like an “uncle” to him.

Ms. Sawyer insisted her network would be providing “fantastic coverage” of the 2012 race, citing the liberal ex-Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos as a key member of her team.

If this is an example of the work to come from ABC News on the 2012 presidential campaign… well, we report, you decide.

BILL O’REILLY, HOST: In the “Back of the Book” segment tonight: As we reported last night, elements of the national liberal media have begun their campaign to re-elect President Obama. The attacks on Fox News are being stepped up, and we used an example of NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell deriding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for criticizing Mr. Obama.

Here now to talk about the Obama advantage in the media, Fox News political analyst Charles Krauthammer, who is in Washington this evening. So how much of an advantage? Because in my lifetime covering politics, 35 years now, I’ve never seen a media as rabidly invested in a president as the liberal national media is in Mr. Obama. Have you?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, I think that is true, and you can see it in a Pew study, Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism that they did in 2008 election. They found that of the three cable networks, Fox played it absolutely right down the middle, the same amount of favorability to McCain as to Obama. CNN three times as favorable to Obama as to McCain; MSNBC 5 to 1. So, I mean, and that was four years ago. Interesting, to give you an idea of how biased the media is, when it issued a press release on that study, Bill, it played it as CNN was the cable norm, with MSNBC on one side and Fox on the other deviating from the norm. The norm being the pro-Obama bias of CNN, rather than the norm that any objective American would say, which is what Fox has done, which was to play it right down the middle.

O’REILLY: Sure. Now, there was another study done by the Center for Media and Public Affairs that showed the network broadcasts — CBS, ABC and NBC — were 68 percent positive for Obama, Senator Obama, then-Senator Obama, 32 percent negative. For John McCain, it was the reverse: 36 positive, 64 negative. So, my contention is that nothing is going to change this time around. That the national TV media and the big urban newspapers, like The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, will all be trying to get President Obama re-elected. So the question then becomes: How much of an advantage is it for the president?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, it’s a major advantage, but you’ve got to remember this. The left, the Democrats always have the press on their side. They’ve had it for 40 years. Nonetheless, the Republicans have won the presidency seven out of the last 11 elections, and that’s because what Republicans have, what conservatives have is the country, which is a center-right country, has remained so almost unchangingly for four decades. So what the media bias does is it slightly — it gives an advantage. It’s a major advantage, but it’s undoing the deficit that Democrats and liberals already have because it’s a country that is not essentially conducive to a liberal message.

And as bad as it appears to be with the tilt in favorable coverage for liberal Barack Obama for, well, somewhat less liberal John McCain – (and here is the result of the study again):

Obama McCain

CBS 73% 31%
NBC 56% 16%
ABC 57% 42%

– I believe it is actually FAR worse than that.

The reason I say that is there’s an implicit assumption that isn’t true; namely, that both John McCain and Barack Obama had exactly the same negative baggage or positive qualities. As an example, if Tom and Dick had pretty much the exact same record, and the press covered Dick more favorably than Tom, you’d certainly be able to show bias.

But what if Dick had a long history of radical associations, beginning with communist Frank Marshall Davis, and including racist un-American bigots such as Jeremiah Wright and terrorists such as William Ayers? What if Dick had all the political baggage of a Chicago thug, including dirty deals with criminal scumbags such as Tony Rezko? What if Dick’s wife had all KINDS of dirty baggage? What if Dick could be documented to have a radical history of being a communist? Just as a couple of examples? Would it be fair or legitimate to expect the coverage to be evenly “favorable” versus “unfavorable,” or would FAIR and OBJECTIVE coverage have skewed dramatically against Dick???

In the case of Barack Obama, the guy who deserved virtually ALL the negative coverage got virtually NONE. Versus war hero John McCain who should have received very little unfavorable coverage and got virutally nothing BUT???

And that same overwhelming media bias that got Obama an undeserved victory and the presidency in 2008 is just as biased today in defending the failure’s record.

There is a fascinating piece at Poynter that describes how since the Reagan era (and possibly before) it has been the standard operating procedure that during a live presidential address, like the one President Obama gave announcing the death of Osama bin Laden, still cameras are not allowed to photograph the actual event.

Photojournalists from Reuters and AP described how President Obama basically had to silently re-enact part of his speech for the still cameras after giving it.

As President Obama continued his nine-minute address in front of just one main network camera, the photographers were held outside the room by staff and asked to remain completely silent. Once Obama was off the air, we were escorted in front of that teleprompter and the President then re-enacted the walk-out and first 30 seconds of the statement for us.

The reason still cameras are not allowed during live presidential addresses is because of the noise from the camera shutters and the placement of the teleprompter, not for any sinister conspiracy-type reasons like we were hoping. And it’s been going on a long time.

The problem, according to Poynter, is that while many newspapers disclose that the photo they use is a re-enactment, some do not. And publishing these photos goes against the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics, which includes this relevant passage: “Resist being manipulated by staged photo opportunities.”

We had no idea there was an ethics code for photojournalists, and we’re thrilled to find out there is one. How dare the White House force them to abandon it! We feel shocked and lied to! This practice of re-staging must come to an end.

So to whatever extent that there is an “ethics code” for journalists, they were only to happy to waive it for their liberal messiah-in-chief.

But let’s see how willing they were to waive the exact same “ethics code” only three days later, for Wednesday’s first Republican debate in South Carolina:

Politico.com
The Associated Press cites “restrictions placed on media access.” Debate sponsors Fox News and the South Carolina Republican Party will only allow photos to be taken in the moments ahead of the debate tonight and not during the event itself, says the news service. “This is about whether visual journalists will be treated with the same respect that text journalists are treated,” says AP senior managing editor Michael Oreskes.

Keach Hagey writes:

Reuters confirmed that it would not be covering the event photographically, because it shared concerns about access. However, Reuters did not confirm whether it would be going as far as AP and not filing text either.

Nope. The self-righteous high-horses were out and promenading across the dance floor when the mainstream media got a chance to denounce the same conditions that they gladly overlooked for their messianic hero Obama.

The same exactissue was at stake: Fox News, the host of the debate, said there would be no still camera photography allowed during the debates. And the same people who rushed to overlook their “ethics” the one time determined to rigidly adhere to them only three days later. And, I suppose, it was nothing more than a complete coincidence that they were so willing to overlook their “ethics” for a liberal president and so determined to rigidly adhere to them for Republicans who want said liberal president’s job just three days later.

Just remember that most of the people who “report” the news are hypocrites and liars who are far more interested in distorting the news than they are in reporting it.

There was that moment frozen in history when Joseph McCarthy went that “one giant leap” too far, and was asked, “Have you no sense of decency?” And that question resonated with the nation, because this was a time when both political parties and the media actually had a sense of decency remaining.

Those days are long gone from the Democrat Party and the mainstream media. Their souls swim in “having no sense of decency.”

Now all we have coming from them are demagogic lies and Goebbels-levels of propaganda:

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin traveled to Haiti this weekend as a guest of the Rev. Franklin Graham and Samaritan’s Purse to spotlight the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the earthquake and cholera-stricken Caribbean (half an) island nation. Instead she has found herself embroiled in a scandal, accused of bringing a hair stylist on the trip to make herself look good for the cameras and “photo-ops.”.

The Associated Press transmitted a photo from Haiti of Palin captioned, “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, center, has her hair done during a visit to a cholera treatment center set up by the NGO Samaritan’s Purse in Cabaret, Haiti, Saturday Dec. 11, 2010. Palin arrived Saturday in Haiti as part of a brief humanitarian mission. Dieu Nalio Chery / AP”

That photo and caption set off rabid attacks on Palin from the Huffington Post, the U.K.’s Daily Mail and, of course, Palingates.

The photo does indeed show Sarah Palin standing with her husband Todd as a woman whose face is obscured uses two hands to fix the hair on the right side of Palin’s head.

However, one can observe that the woman is white, with her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing a white shirt with a bulky scarf and dark pants.

In other photos from Saturday, Todd and Sarah Palin’s white, brunette, eldest daughter Bristol, who accompanied her parents on the trip to Haiti, is wearing the exact same clothing and ponytail as the “hair stylist” in the AP photo.

That’s right, what the Palin-hating AP and others fail to report is that the “hair stylist” is Bristol Palin.

The AP photographer who sent the caption would have known that it was Bristol Palin, but by not mentioning her the AP was able to do a media hit on Palin but still be able to claim they told the “truth” with the caption.

The Palins and the Grahams in Haiti (“hair stylist” Bristol second from right):

To reiterate, a daughter helps fix a loose strand of her mother’s hair, and it becomes an international scandal. Amazing.

I don’t think that Sarah Palin should run for president in 2012. I think she’s great, with a rare degree of common sense and the courage to square off with both parties to get things done. But I literally don’t think the country deserves her at this point.

The left, the Democrats, the mainstream media, have come so completely unglued, and told so many demonic lies about Sarah Palin, that I don’t think she could overcome the vomit that has counted as “coverage” of Sarah Palin.

And they won’t stop. They are so full of hate that it just oozes out of them. And it has to keep spewing out.

When large and once-respected media outlets like the Associated Press deliberately insight demagogic hatred of an undeserving major political figure, we are degenerating into a truly dangerous place.

Reuters has a habit of doing this..This photo was taken today at the IBEW in Maryland
photo via weaselzippers, Notice ‘attitude, skill, knowledge’ is perfectly in line with the edge

This is the IBEW seal that Obama was photographed in…
U.S. President Barack Obama tours a training center at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 26 Headquarters in Lanham, Maryland, February 16, 2010.REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

I don’t begrudge political campaigns from photographing their candidates in a favorable light (although the halo thing is kind of spooky – and, yes, Bush’s handlers gave him a halo on at least one occasion). But when journalists who are supposed to be objective do it – and do it repeatedly – you cross a line into true propaganda.

Some might argue that Obama’s propaganda treatment was more favorable than McCain’s. But that’s a judgment call.

Outright propaganda and the political left have always gone hand in hand. From Stalin to Hitler to Mao to Castro and Che Guevara, we have always seen the media glorify their chosen leaders in pictures and print.

The media used propaganda to influence stupid peoples’ votes in so many ways. Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of stupid people in this country.

It would be nice if the Obama administration got its narrative straight. Christine Romer, the chair of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, says that the stimulus pretty much had all the effect it’s going to have. And while she’s saying that, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is proclaiming that the stimulus was designed with a two-year horizon and that “half that effect is still ahead of us.” Maybe they could get together and cook their story.

It wouldn’t hurt if the White House got its basic facts straight, while they were at it.

WASHINGTON – The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan. It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.

Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama’s stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money. He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.

“I think you’ll see a pretty good degree of accuracy,” DeSeve said in an interview.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP’s review, telling reporters, “We’re talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error.”

The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program — or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

• Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.

• A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.

• The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects. But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.

Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business’ claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs. TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.

The short-term positions should have been reported as 635 full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs under the government’s method of calculating stimulus work, Tan said.

Now, first of all, stop and contemplate the farce that is going on here. We have lost 3 million jobs since Obama bluffed and pandered his generational theft act through Congress. And they are touting 30,000 jobs as a success? I mean, 30,000 jobs created or saved is a massive failure on its face. And then it turns out that even many of those 30,000 jobs are bogus.

Obama promised his Wreckovery Act would create 3 million new jobs. The fact that he now has to play games to create the illusion that he “saved” or created a minuscule 30 thousand jobs is a screaming testimony to what a failure Obama has truly been.

The White House, according to media reports, is blasting the Associated Press for exposing this new Obama administration fabrication. I guess they’re not a “legitimate news agency,” either.

Economists forecast the nation’s total output grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent between July and September, after contracting for a record four straight quarters. That growth has been fueled by a huge influx of government cash, including a temporary tax credit for first-time homeowners and a $1.25 trillion Federal Reserve program to keep mortgage rates low.

In other words, the GDP grew, my hind end. Rather, the government spent a ton of money, the result of which was to artificially pump up the economy. It’s the equivalent of borrowing a ton of money you don’t have to buy a car you can’t afford in order to impress your neighbors. Only it’s Obama instead of you, and it’s trillions of dollars rather than thousands.